4 ms·

> However, these do not maintain the "archival quality" document storage that is needed for academic scientific literature. In day-to-day, all researchers use t

by gwern 6y ago

> However, these do not maintain the "archival quality" document storage that is needed for academic scientific literature. In day-to-day, all researchers use these to stay informed on recent results. But how to guarantee that nobody hacks in and figures out how to change a few bytes in one paper that is 10years old? How to guarantee that these documents are available 75 years from now? I have never had a link to Arxiv or Biorxiv break, and I have never had difficulty finding a copy of a paper on them either, going back to Arxiv's founding in 1991. On the other hand, on a daily basis, I struggle to get a copy of a paper published often just years or decades old from these 'archival quality' publishers like Elsevier, and they break my links so frequently that I spend some time every day fixing broken links on y website (and for new links, I have simply stopped link them entirely & host any PDF I need so I don't have to deal with their bullshit in the future). I guess "archival-quality publisher" is used in much the same way as the phrase "academic-quality source code"...

MrGunn 6y ago
Hey Gwern, big fan of your GPT2 work. I notice I'm surprised to hear you say you struggle daily to fix broken links to the Elsevier catalog at ScienceDirect, because the links are used by libraries all over the world & they don't have the same feedback. Would you have a few examples available for me to send to the folks responsible?
- gwern 6y ago
  Nature does it all the time. Here's one I fixed just this morning when I noticed it by accident: http://www.nature.com/mp/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/mp2015225a.html http://www.nature.com/mp/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/mp201522... (Note, by the way, how very helpfully Nature redirects it to the homepage without an error. That's what the reader wants, right? To go to the homepage and for Nature to deliberately conceal the error from the website maintainer? This is definitely what every 'archival quality' journal should do, IMO, just to show off their top-notch quality and helpful ways and why we pay them so much taxpayer money.) Oh, SpringerLink broke a whole bunch which I am still fixing, here's two from yesterday: http://www.springerlink.com/content/5mmg0gmtg69g6978/ http://www.springerlink.com/content/5mmg0gmtg69g6978/ http://www.springerlink.com/content/p26143p057591031/ http://www.springerlink.com/content/p26143p057591031/ And here's an amusing ScienceDirect example: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0006320719321032 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S000632071... (I would have loads more specifically ScienceDirect examples except I learned many years ago to never link ScienceDirect PDFs because the links expire or otherwise break.)
  - Animats 6y ago
    Do Nature's spinoffs have any prestige any more? Anything in a Nature spinoff related to batteries comes across as PR Newswire level material. If that.
  - Majromax 6y ago
    Isn't this exactly the intended use-case for the DOI? Your first article has the DOI 10.1038/mp.2015.225, and the resulting link (https://doi.org/10.1038/mp.2015.225 https://doi.org/10.1038/mp.2015.225) properly directs to the article's present location.
    - gwern 6y ago
      DOIs link to paywalls or temporarily-unembargoed papers, have to be hunted down (many places hide the DOIs in tabs or, like JSTOR, actually bury it in the HTML source itself!), and break things like section links as well. Adding yet another level of indirection is not my idea of a solution and hardly speaks well of 'archive-quality publishers' that we have to resort to third parties to work around their hideously broken websites which, like Nature, go out of their way to make links not just break but actively misleading.
      - MrGunn 6y ago
        To solve your immediate problem, just grab the DOI here: https://apps.crossref.org/SimpleTextQuery https://apps.crossref.org/SimpleTextQuery They also have an API from which you can fetch DOIs in various ways. DOIs are a solution to the issue of having persistent, publisher-independent links that will always resolve, even if a journal changes publisher or goes out of business. Academia uses them because link rot is unavoidable across the web, but there must always be a link to the publication that resolves so that when someone in 2070 wants to follow a citation in the references of a work published today, they can do that. It's the same thinking that underlies people pointing to the internet archive in Wikipedia citations. It's a layer of redirection, but in a way that preserves accessibility for the long term. It's also the same thinking that underlies DNS. There shouldn't be one company that controls how to resolve an IP address to a domain name, and likewise you shouldn't have to go through one publisher to resolve a reference to a research article. As a side note, Crossref is staffed with exactly the sort of web geeks that you would see at an Internet Archive get-together (#). So I hear your frustrations, but I think you're giving DOIs short shrift. (#) I mean, just look at this. A dump of all journal metadata on Academic Torrents. Is that not cool? https://www.crossref.org/blog/free-public-data-file-of-112-million-crossref-records/ https://www.crossref.org/blog/free-public-data-file-of-112-m...

by gwern 6y ago

MrGunn 6y ago

Hey Gwern, big fan of your GPT2 work. I notice I'm surprised to hear you say you struggle daily to fix broken links to the Elsevier catalog at ScienceDirect, because the links are used by libraries all over the world & they don't have the same feedback. Would you have a few examples available for me to send to the folks responsible?

gwern 6y ago
Nature does it all the time. Here's one I fixed just this morning when I noticed it by accident: http://www.nature.com/mp/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/mp2015225a.html http://www.nature.com/mp/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/mp201522... (Note, by the way, how very helpfully Nature redirects it to the homepage without an error. That's what the reader wants, right? To go to the homepage and for Nature to deliberately conceal the error from the website maintainer? This is definitely what every 'archival quality' journal should do, IMO, just to show off their top-notch quality and helpful ways and why we pay them so much taxpayer money.) Oh, SpringerLink broke a whole bunch which I am still fixing, here's two from yesterday: http://www.springerlink.com/content/5mmg0gmtg69g6978/ http://www.springerlink.com/content/5mmg0gmtg69g6978/ http://www.springerlink.com/content/p26143p057591031/ http://www.springerlink.com/content/p26143p057591031/ And here's an amusing ScienceDirect example: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0006320719321032 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S000632071... (I would have loads more specifically ScienceDirect examples except I learned many years ago to never link ScienceDirect PDFs because the links expire or otherwise break.)
- Animats 6y ago
  Do Nature's spinoffs have any prestige any more? Anything in a Nature spinoff related to batteries comes across as PR Newswire level material. If that.
- Majromax 6y ago
  Isn't this exactly the intended use-case for the DOI? Your first article has the DOI 10.1038/mp.2015.225, and the resulting link (https://doi.org/10.1038/mp.2015.225 https://doi.org/10.1038/mp.2015.225) properly directs to the article's present location.
  - gwern 6y ago
    DOIs link to paywalls or temporarily-unembargoed papers, have to be hunted down (many places hide the DOIs in tabs or, like JSTOR, actually bury it in the HTML source itself!), and break things like section links as well. Adding yet another level of indirection is not my idea of a solution and hardly speaks well of 'archive-quality publishers' that we have to resort to third parties to work around their hideously broken websites which, like Nature, go out of their way to make links not just break but actively misleading.
    - MrGunn 6y ago
      To solve your immediate problem, just grab the DOI here: https://apps.crossref.org/SimpleTextQuery https://apps.crossref.org/SimpleTextQuery They also have an API from which you can fetch DOIs in various ways. DOIs are a solution to the issue of having persistent, publisher-independent links that will always resolve, even if a journal changes publisher or goes out of business. Academia uses them because link rot is unavoidable across the web, but there must always be a link to the publication that resolves so that when someone in 2070 wants to follow a citation in the references of a work published today, they can do that. It's the same thinking that underlies people pointing to the internet archive in Wikipedia citations. It's a layer of redirection, but in a way that preserves accessibility for the long term. It's also the same thinking that underlies DNS. There shouldn't be one company that controls how to resolve an IP address to a domain name, and likewise you shouldn't have to go through one publisher to resolve a reference to a research article. As a side note, Crossref is staffed with exactly the sort of web geeks that you would see at an Internet Archive get-together (#). So I hear your frustrations, but I think you're giving DOIs short shrift. (#) I mean, just look at this. A dump of all journal metadata on Academic Torrents. Is that not cool? https://www.crossref.org/blog/free-public-data-file-of-112-million-crossref-records/ https://www.crossref.org/blog/free-public-data-file-of-112-m...